Thursday, November 02, 2017

Exercise Data is Beautiful

Strava's Global Heatmap is a beautiful visualization of Strava user activity across the globe. The map uses 13 trillion rasterized pixels to display 1 billion activities. The result is in an amazing map showing where Stava users love to cycle and run.

According to Strava the Global Heatmap is now hotter than ever before. In a blog post, The Global Heatmap, Now 6x Hotter Strava have explained how they manage to assemble and visualize this much data so seamlessly on an interactive map. The map also now uses Mapbox GL. This change means that users of the map can rotate and tilt the map to get a different angle on all those energetic journeys.

Activity tracking application Human has also created a global interactive map showing where people love to bike and run. One Day on Human provides a snapshot of just one day's walking, running and, cycling activity from March of last year.

One Day on Human provides an interesting visualization of where the Human app is being used around the world. A lot of people actually seem to be using the app not only as a fitness tracking app but to record their general movements. For example, people have been using the app to track themselves on ferry journeys around New York and on London's M25 orbital motorway.

The Nike+ Places map also provides an informative heat map layer visualizing the most popular running routes for owners of Nike's running app and tracking devices.

Using the heat map layer you can search for the most popular running routes in any location around the world. In truth the popular routes revealed by the heat map layer aren't a great surprise. Parks and off-road routes seem to be very popular with joggers. For example in London the major parks and canal tow paths seem to have a strong appeal to a lot of Nike+ users.